A Constitutional 'Work in Progress'? The Charter and the Limits of Progressive Interpretation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The notion that the Constitution is a living tree - that its provisions can grow and develop to meet new social, political and historical realities - is well established in Canada. Nevertheless, there are limits to what may be accomplished through constitutional interpretation, limits that are crucial to the legitimacy of constitutional judicial review. The difficulty of amending the Canadian Constitution is usually assumed to be an argument in support of progressive interpretation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but the proper inference runs in the opposite direction: the difficulty in amending the Constitution is a compelling reason for the Court to be circumspect when it comes to interpreting the Charter, since interpretation may, in effect, change the Charter. When interpretation causes constitutional change, the Court establishes a burden on those opposed to that change to amend the Constitution, and we run into the very problem that was said to justify the need for living tree interpretation in the first place - the difficulty in amending the Constitution. The author traces the development of the living tree concept in Canadian constitutional law and its extension to the interpretation of the Charter. He considers the Supreme Court of Canada's approach to living tree interpretation and addresses Gosselin v Quebec, in which the Court specifically leaves open the possibility that the Charter might one day be interpreted to include positive obligations such as economic rights, an interpretation he suggests would be tantamount to a constitutional change.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.029 | 0.056 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.104 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.021 | 0.025 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.017 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".